Profiles and Permission Sets in Our Recruiting App

We've talked about four types of users: recruiters, hiring managers, standard employees, and interviewers. Let's take a closer look.

Recruiters are pretty straightforward—they definitely represent a particular job function, and they need access to different types of data than other users. They need their own profile.

A hiring manager, however, is not exactly a single type of position. For most organizations, a hiring manager in the Sales department will almost certainly need access to a different type of data than a hiring manager in Engineering. However, for our app, sales managers and software managers still need the same types of access to recruiting data—reviews, candidates, positions, job applications, job postings, and employment websites. If we incorporated our app into an organization with other CRM functionality, the hiring manager permissions for recruiting-related data might need to be shared by several types of users who may have different profiles. In this case, we’ll make a hiring manager permission set that can be assigned to various types of users.

Standard employees are pretty generic, and they don’t reflect a particular job function. Standard employees can start with a profile that gives access to a small set of data, and then depending on what their specialties are, we can create and assign permission sets to give them more access as needed.

Finally, let's look at interviewers. When you think about it, just about anyone in an organization might be called upon to perform an interview. Furthermore, a company may have a peak recruiting season, when many employees will be interviewers for a limited amount of time. Ideally, permissions for interviewers could be easily granted and revoked as needed. It’s easy to define permission sets based on a particular task—and even easier to assign and unassign them, so let's define a permission set for interviewers.